Bisons For The Sultan.

This is a piece I wrote recently for a meeting of the Torrevieja Writers´Circle. I was fascinated by the story of this small, specialised Swedish company and thought other people might like to read about it too. So here follows the piece, entitled:

Bisons For The Sultan.



The London Symphony Orchestra has them, you can find them at the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong and now the Sultan of Oman has paid a whopping 1.8 million crowns for them. They are solid, secure, extendable, inclinable, easily moveable, extremely comfortable musicians´ chairs from a small company working from the middle of a forest in Sweden.

The company which produces them, Bison, operates from a typically Swedish red wooden building in the small village of Årjäng in Värmland. It sn´t as big as IKEA with its billions of euros in annual sales . Bison´s profit in 2009 was a mere 9 million Swedish Crowns, which seems like a drop in the ocean by comparison. However, if you consider the fact that Bison has only 7 employees, of whom 2 are the owners, and that the company operates in the very specialist branch of supplies for the music industry, then you have to concede that they´re doing very nicely, thank you.

Bison and Ikea are similar in that they both started in a very small way. Ingvar Kampryd cycled around selling matches at the start of his career.The owners of Bison are Ingegerd Bryntesson and her husband Lennart. She worked as a post office cashier and he was a supply teacher. Their company, which used to sell a variety of things, one of which was a folding axe from Norway, was originally just a sideline. Both Kampryd and the Bryntessons worked from home to begin with until they found their niche. With Kampryd it was furniture while the Bryntessons developed an interest in products for musicians.

It all started with a music stand they liked the look of and decided to retail. Although neither of them are musicians or even particularly musical they decided it was a good item and for ten years they kept their day jobs, sold music stands and supplemented their income by buying and selling berries and mushrooms.

Things took off when, in the mid-nineties, the Berwald Concert Hall in Stockholm contacted them looking for a comfortable, ergonomic chair for its musicians in the orchestra pit. The subsequent collaboration between the professional musicians and the Bryntessons resulted in a chair which is used all over Sweden in concert halls, churches, and colleges of music. It has also become standard in many venues in England, Germany, Norway, Russia, the Baltic States and most recently Oman, where the Sultan´s Symphony Orchestra sits very comfortably while playing for him.

Lennart Bryntesson, like Ingvar Kampryd, has clear ideas on how a good business should be. He is a very Swedish-style boss.He has a Facebook page and writes a blog on the Bison Website, where his photo is, together with those of his wife and the other employees. The building they work in is heated by log burners and all the staff cut the wood for the stoves during working hours. He regards his fellow workers highly and doesn´t believe in inflated salaries for management . Everyone at Bison has the same salary , he and his wife included. It makes things much simpler, and all their jobs are equally important, he believes. He is active in the Swedish Mission Church and 10 per cent of Bison´s profits go every year to charitable projects abroad in countries like Nepal and Ethiopia.

Even if you are not a singer or a musician, you can see from the web site photos that Bison´s products are very high quality.The choir risers look solid enough for a Welsh miners´choir of Pavarotti proportions. Security for the artists who use the company´s products is central to his business idea – hence the publicity photo of a car parked on a Bison stage, patently demonstrating the construction´s strength and sturdiness.

Despite the recession, the company is doing well and after a successful delivery to the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, a recent enquiry from Kansas City makes a breakthrough into the American market closer. Perhaps the Sultan could have a word with Barak Obama?